Evie Wyld has lived in South East London for most of her adult life, with frequent trips to Australia, and to her family’s sugar cane farm in New South Wales. Much of her writing begins with the landscapes of her childhood, remembering being alone Out the Back and making up stories.

Evie Wyld

Interview by Natascha ScrivenerTell us a bit about your award winning(!) first novel After the Fire, a Still Small Voice.ATFASSV is set in Australia and it follows the lives of three men living in different times, all of whom have been affected in some way by a war.What part of the book did you find the hardest to write and why?My uncle was conscripted and fought in the war in Vietnam, and so those parts were particularly important to me to get right. The best way I was able to deal with the problem of having a personal connection with a section was by trying to write it in the exact same way I wrote the rest of it. So it wasn’t that it was harder to write exactly, more that I sweated over it after I’d written it.Which comes first? The character's story or the idea for the novel?I find I can’t write if I have an idea, the stuff that happens has to come from the character.> Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?I’ve lived most of my life in Peckham, South East London, but my mother’s Australian, so as a kid I spent long summers over there on my family’s sugar cane farm. Now I live in Camberwell and work in a small independent bookshop in Peckham, called Review.What do you do when you are not writing?Worry. Pretend to be writing. Look up sharks and ghost stories on the internet and pretend it’s research.Do you have a day job as well?The bookshop work is part time and I also work for The Literary Consultancy - so I read unpublished manuscripts and try to help the authors with them.When did you first start writing and when did you finish your first book?I started writing it in 2005 and finished in 2008How did you choose the genre you write in?I didn’t, I just wrote what I could write.

Where do you get your ideas?The same place you get any ideas from I suppose - childhood, adulthood, books and Wallander.

Do you ever experience writer’s block?I don’t like the term - it’s too mystic somehow. I sometimes find writing very hard, and I’m very slow at it, but the moment I start thinking to myself ‘I’ve got a block’ I feel like a total dick. My writer’s block’ is usually me being lazy.Do you work with an outline, or just write?To begin with, I just write, but once I’ve done a first draft I try and work out what the story is. I’ve tried setting out an outline before, and for me it just produces boring, dead writing - I like to be surprised by where the story goes.

Is there any particular author or book that influenced you in any way either growing up or as an adult?Growing up, I loved Angela Carter and Tim Winton. I still love Tim Winton, and I’d still give Angela Carter to anyone who is going through puberty.Can you tell us about your challenges in getting your first book published?I was very luck, it all happened quite smoothly. The challenge was writing the book.

If you had to go back and do it all over, is there any aspect of your novel or getting it published that you would change?I’ve changed as a writer since my first novel, and I know from doing readings of it that I would take out lots of words now, but that’s cool - I was a different writer then. I’m really pleased with how my first book was received, and the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with.How do you market your work? What avenues have you found to work best for your genre?Erk, I suppose the only thing I could say here is that I recognise the importance of independent bookshops and of doing as much of the promotion as you can your self. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic publacist at Cape, but the bottom line is they don’t have the money they used to, to spend on literary fiction, and so it’s important to take some of that responsibility for yourself, especially as a first time author.Have you written a book you love that you have not been able to get published?No, After the Fire was my first go.What has been your biggest criticism and your greatest compliment?I had a review that said ‘in a word, awful’, the biggest compliment has been to be listed for prizes alongside other authors I think of as heroes.

I've read on your website that it took you three years to write. What was your writing process like?For the first 6 moths or so I tried to write 1000 words a day, no matter what. Then I slowly shaped a story out of them. Very slowly.Are you working on anything at the moment?I’m just finishing my second novel.Could you tell us about your experience of getting published? Was it a slow process or did it all happen quite quickly, and how did you go about sending off your manuscript and approaching people in the industry?I was approached by an agent after having a short story published on line. She asked me to write a novel and once it was finished it was sold pretty quickly. There was a nice bit of interest so I was lucky enough to have a bit of a bidding war (which sounds much more cut throat and energetic than it was).

Why do you write?I can’t do much else to a degree that keeps me happy.

If you were given the opportunity to do book signings anywhere you wanted, what cities or countries would definitely be on your book tour?Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Antwerp, anywhere in Canada (they have a lovely attitude towards authors there), and if dinner was included Tokyo.What advice would you give to writers looking to get published?Get an agent. If you can’t get an agent then go back to your manuscript and work on it until you can. They are invaluable. And don’t view agents and publishers, as so many writers do, as blood-suckers who only publish mainstream commercial crap. Pretty much everyone I’ve met in the industry works in it because of a deep love and an interest in books, in really good writing and stories.